Harmonix making new game

Guitar Hero and Rock Band creator Harmonix is hard at work designing a new game not based around matching pre-recorded music using plastic peripherals.

The news was unearthed on the official Game Developer Conference 2008 website, which lists a lecture session by senior designer Chris Foster, who will talk about the difficulties of moving away from a tried and tested formula in favour of something new.

This "other project" will create music algorithmically, you see, so Harmonix wants to show you lot how it decided which bits to keep and which bits to discard. Apparently special focus will also be given to "unique input mechanics", too, so perhaps it has something up its sequinned-sleeve after all.

You may also remember, as Kotaku reminded us, that Harmonix has filed trademarks for a game called Beat Boy in the past - software for portable devices that uses wizardry to algorithmically create new music from existing MP3 files.